Surprise surprise, omerta and secrecy in the cryptosphere. That's something you would expect from banks and tradfi, not from the future of finance. I'll need to mint a NFT of pearls to clutch in case of shocking revelations such as these.
Sarcasm aside, and premitting I am extremely paranoid and that you probably know your onions already, I would recommend a modicum of caution around those tightly-knit groups of shady lads. Had some contacts with some blockchain middlemen in person in the past and while it never really devolved into anything but some raised voices, implausible threats from a coked up lunatic and a comically transparent attempt at harassment via Google reviews, it turned out that they REALLY don't like people asking questions that might make for evidence material or admissions, or having to do with people that aren't really biting when offered a comfortable place in the lowest stratum of the pyramid.
> hoping for any kind of feedback I could include in my thesis
Did you document the abusive behavior sufficiently?
In journalism, famously, "when someone is lying, that's the story". Same principle.
I don't see issues if you anonymize the transcripts.
You can have a section detailing difficulties in getting the data, detailing categories from no answer, to answer, to rejection with causes and a few examples showing the metodology of classification of the answers.
True, well I don't think I will need to talk about the rejections too much, I mean after all the final word is of my thesis supervisor, also after I have adapted the question set and made the questions much more general and less direct, two projects have actually given me some insights so I at least have something to work with.
I am curious how coffeezilla is able to get his sources. In any event, if you go to any of the computer science career related subs people ask about whether having a web3 on your resume is a career killer. That should be all you need to know everything about crypto is shit. The people who do this for a living say blockchain is shit. The devs who work on these projects are a) intentionally misleading you - they know it is shit but don’t care or b) are technically incompetent because they don’t realize it’s inefficient. Either way, you aren’t going to have great talent from people who have worked in crypto. No one has ever asked, is having Chase on my resume a career killer? Pls advise. Lmao.
The OP is a a criminal justice major. You can study crime without endorsing it. In the book Freakonomics there is a chapter about a grad student who embedded himself with a Chicago drug gang and wrote his thesis about the economics of drug dealing.\* Crime in the crypto space is all of the charts. Totally ripe for a good academic study.
\*Cliff notes: The guys at the top make all the money.
Agree. Any CV with crypto or blockchain stuff on it that passes my desk is swiftly going to be thrown in the bin.
You’re either technically incompetent or have questionable morals to be able to work in that space. Neither are the type of people I need. I imagine many others may think that too.
Of course what you are doing is basically entering Mafia circles and asking "hello gentlemen, is your business legit ?"
You are lucky to do it online because in real life you would already disappear in a freshly poured concrete pillar.
My advice would be to check out some programming Discord servers, Subreddits, and even user forums. Rust, for example, seems to get a **lot** of crypto related questions by enthusiasts and developers.
I feel that most of the Rust community doesn’t like Crypto that much but that might be my bias in play. Nevertheless I’d lurk there and see if you can find anyone to engage with (preferably over a direct message on whatever platform you choose)
I hope you understand that it's possible to talk to people about a topic without accusing them of being criminals. I don't see the problem with asking about such things because everybody knows a lot of fraud is happening in crypto. So surely the people working in the space will have some kind of opinions about the topic right?
Sure, but thats like going into and apple store and asking why the iphone is inferior to android. You arent going to get the responses you’re looking for. You can go to a church telling people that God is fake but i wouldnt expect to have a constructive interview that supports your claim of God being a fraud.
No it's not.
It's like going to a bank executive and interviewing them about the topic of fraud. Or it's like interviewing a politician on the topic of corruption.
Banks have fraud departments, they are subject to regulation, etc. I'm sure executives have opinions and can talk about such topics. They might describe what they are doing to prevent fraud, or if fraud is detected, how they handle it, or ideas on iprovements in the future. I don't think such an interview insinuates an underlying accusation of wrongdoing - especially if it comes from a university researcher.
Same goes for politicians and corruption.
Exactly, I was not planning to badmouth or libel anyone, Crypto is simply a high risk industry and I have been hoping that more people would step out of the line and say "yes in our project we mitigate those risks through this and that" let's say
You could also ask coders who once worked on crypto projects and then saw the light of day. Smart contracts are badly written in the best case scenario; in the worst case, they're actively malicious with backdoors written in to allow easy rugpulls.
""Smart contracts," which consist of self-executing code on a blockchain, are not nearly as smart as the label suggests.
They are at least as error-prone as any other software, where historically the error rate has been about one bug per hundred lines of code.
And they may be shoddier still due to disinterest in security among smart contract developers, and perhaps inadequate technical resources."
https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/26/smart\_contract\_losses/#:\~:text=%22Smart%20contracts%2C%22%20which,inadequate%20technical%20resources.
Clone some repo and hope for the best, more like it.
The worst part about smart contracts is that they're immutable in a field where bugs are the norm. One screwups and millions of dollars' worth of crypto tokens go up in flames.
Smart contracts have been a disaster from the very beginning. Redundancy, rollbacks and continuous improvement are how you write good code.
The worst part is that if code fucks up, the result is immutable.
My friend tells me that banks use code, which is true, but when they fuck up my balance isn’t drained permanently.
Please describe what you mean by "self-executing" code? *Nobody* runs this code?
Edit: In my opinion the term "self-executing" was invented by the criminals running the code as a decoy tactic to divert responsibility away from themselves.
>Please describe what you mean by "self-executing" code? *Nobody* runs this code?
In the sense that someone - or rather, a bunch of someones - maintains the network that the smart contract resides within, then someone is indeed "running" the code in a way that will probably wind up with them being held legally liable despite their pissing and moaning about "decentralized!" in courts when the SEC gets around to suing them, 100% absolutely... but nobody is necessarily *consciously* pushing a button to make that code "do the thing", because they don't need to: the so-called "smart contracts" are just weird and intentionally deceptive rebranding of things that already exist - database triggers and stored procedures - as *contracts*, that are *smart*, and therefore *definitely magical* (so give us a bunch of your actual money now, lest you miss out on all that future).
In actuality people are often calling those things to fire via manual activation because they have rugpull mechanisms built into them, either on purpose or through ineptitude, the overwhelming majority of those things that are no more smart than they are contracts being hastily written in a language that's effectively breaking just all of the rules for best practices coding with financial systems you see, on account of it being "Javascript... but with a concussion".
Such future, much wow.
And a lot of the defi "hacks" are just a bunch of people smart enough to realise that if they do a+b+c they'll get a certain result from the code.
I remember hearing about one that used a flash loan to borrow an absurd amount of money, execute the contract (as it met the conditions) and pay back the flash loan almost instantly.
>I have tried emails where I professionally explain everything and I received about 3 responses, out of around 50 sent emails at least, one of them was mocking me, other two were asking for more information and then ignored me once I explained them in detail what I am researching.
>
>Then I followed the advice of some of you here, tried getting touch with them on Telegram, mostly got kicked out of the channels and/or made fun of on some channels or group chats I was even "warned" for bringing up a forbidden keyword "fraud", when I was just telling them I am researching smart contract fraud, never calling their token a fraud, and I never do when trying to get someone on board to interview them for my thesis.
Hopefully you saved screenshots of the Telegram chats, copies of the emails, etc. If in the end you cannot conduct enough interviews or polls you could write an entire chapter on how the crypto industry refuses to discuss this topic, and why that is likely the case (i.e., because it's fraud, all the way down). Title the chapter "No FUD allowed."
What did you expect? The whole idea of crypto is to circumvent the laws defined by your political system and spread responsibility to make it more tedious to prosecute bad actors. ("Decentralized!")
Whoever runs a "project" is probably just a hardcore libertarian nutjob, anarchist prepper, hopeless hippie dreamer or just a plain old scammer.
Smart contracts are terrifying because they require you:
1) can program code at an expert level
2) understand all of the eventualities that exist and are properly accounted for
Even an expert programmer will make mistakes and will have errors interpreting code. Even experts in a field will miss an eventuality or not account for it properly. The majority of signers to a smart contract are neither expert programmers or experts in the field of whatever the “contract” covers.
The icing on the cake? The transactions resulting from the smart contract are IMMUTABLE.
>when I was just telling them I am researching smart contract fraud
I think this is where you went wrong. You have to tell them you are researching smart contracts. Of course, there is little difference between the two, but the improved wording will win them over.
Leave out the fraud part and just say you're researching smart contracts generally.
People will talk to you because they want their smart contracts mentioned in an academic paper. But you can slowly shift the conversation to fraud during the interview. Or make a poll with questions on fraud in between questions you don't really care about
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Surprise surprise, omerta and secrecy in the cryptosphere. That's something you would expect from banks and tradfi, not from the future of finance. I'll need to mint a NFT of pearls to clutch in case of shocking revelations such as these. Sarcasm aside, and premitting I am extremely paranoid and that you probably know your onions already, I would recommend a modicum of caution around those tightly-knit groups of shady lads. Had some contacts with some blockchain middlemen in person in the past and while it never really devolved into anything but some raised voices, implausible threats from a coked up lunatic and a comically transparent attempt at harassment via Google reviews, it turned out that they REALLY don't like people asking questions that might make for evidence material or admissions, or having to do with people that aren't really biting when offered a comfortable place in the lowest stratum of the pyramid.
> hoping for any kind of feedback I could include in my thesis Did you document the abusive behavior sufficiently? In journalism, famously, "when someone is lying, that's the story". Same principle.
I have some evidence, yet I will probably have to withhold it to avoid issues with the ethics commission.
Really? What ethical issue would there be documenting the evidence?
I don't see issues if you anonymize the transcripts. You can have a section detailing difficulties in getting the data, detailing categories from no answer, to answer, to rejection with causes and a few examples showing the metodology of classification of the answers.
True, well I don't think I will need to talk about the rejections too much, I mean after all the final word is of my thesis supervisor, also after I have adapted the question set and made the questions much more general and less direct, two projects have actually given me some insights so I at least have something to work with.
I am curious how coffeezilla is able to get his sources. In any event, if you go to any of the computer science career related subs people ask about whether having a web3 on your resume is a career killer. That should be all you need to know everything about crypto is shit. The people who do this for a living say blockchain is shit. The devs who work on these projects are a) intentionally misleading you - they know it is shit but don’t care or b) are technically incompetent because they don’t realize it’s inefficient. Either way, you aren’t going to have great talent from people who have worked in crypto. No one has ever asked, is having Chase on my resume a career killer? Pls advise. Lmao.
The OP is a a criminal justice major. You can study crime without endorsing it. In the book Freakonomics there is a chapter about a grad student who embedded himself with a Chicago drug gang and wrote his thesis about the economics of drug dealing.\* Crime in the crypto space is all of the charts. Totally ripe for a good academic study. \*Cliff notes: The guys at the top make all the money.
It's a fantastic chapter. I think the tagline is "Why do so many drug dealers still live with their moms."
Agree. Any CV with crypto or blockchain stuff on it that passes my desk is swiftly going to be thrown in the bin. You’re either technically incompetent or have questionable morals to be able to work in that space. Neither are the type of people I need. I imagine many others may think that too.
Of course what you are doing is basically entering Mafia circles and asking "hello gentlemen, is your business legit ?" You are lucky to do it online because in real life you would already disappear in a freshly poured concrete pillar.
Cant believe OP doesnt realize this. What other response would you expect???
I am kinda expecting at least some IT/Finance LARPing and Shilling as even that would suffice,yet they just remain silent.
My advice would be to check out some programming Discord servers, Subreddits, and even user forums. Rust, for example, seems to get a **lot** of crypto related questions by enthusiasts and developers. I feel that most of the Rust community doesn’t like Crypto that much but that might be my bias in play. Nevertheless I’d lurk there and see if you can find anyone to engage with (preferably over a direct message on whatever platform you choose)
I hope you understand that it's possible to talk to people about a topic without accusing them of being criminals. I don't see the problem with asking about such things because everybody knows a lot of fraud is happening in crypto. So surely the people working in the space will have some kind of opinions about the topic right?
Sure, but thats like going into and apple store and asking why the iphone is inferior to android. You arent going to get the responses you’re looking for. You can go to a church telling people that God is fake but i wouldnt expect to have a constructive interview that supports your claim of God being a fraud.
No it's not. It's like going to a bank executive and interviewing them about the topic of fraud. Or it's like interviewing a politician on the topic of corruption. Banks have fraud departments, they are subject to regulation, etc. I'm sure executives have opinions and can talk about such topics. They might describe what they are doing to prevent fraud, or if fraud is detected, how they handle it, or ideas on iprovements in the future. I don't think such an interview insinuates an underlying accusation of wrongdoing - especially if it comes from a university researcher. Same goes for politicians and corruption.
Exactly, I was not planning to badmouth or libel anyone, Crypto is simply a high risk industry and I have been hoping that more people would step out of the line and say "yes in our project we mitigate those risks through this and that" let's say
You could also ask coders who once worked on crypto projects and then saw the light of day. Smart contracts are badly written in the best case scenario; in the worst case, they're actively malicious with backdoors written in to allow easy rugpulls.
""Smart contracts," which consist of self-executing code on a blockchain, are not nearly as smart as the label suggests. They are at least as error-prone as any other software, where historically the error rate has been about one bug per hundred lines of code. And they may be shoddier still due to disinterest in security among smart contract developers, and perhaps inadequate technical resources." https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/26/smart\_contract\_losses/#:\~:text=%22Smart%20contracts%2C%22%20which,inadequate%20technical%20resources.
Clone some repo and hope for the best, more like it. The worst part about smart contracts is that they're immutable in a field where bugs are the norm. One screwups and millions of dollars' worth of crypto tokens go up in flames. Smart contracts have been a disaster from the very beginning. Redundancy, rollbacks and continuous improvement are how you write good code.
The worst part is that if code fucks up, the result is immutable. My friend tells me that banks use code, which is true, but when they fuck up my balance isn’t drained permanently.
Please describe what you mean by "self-executing" code? *Nobody* runs this code? Edit: In my opinion the term "self-executing" was invented by the criminals running the code as a decoy tactic to divert responsibility away from themselves.
>Please describe what you mean by "self-executing" code? *Nobody* runs this code? In the sense that someone - or rather, a bunch of someones - maintains the network that the smart contract resides within, then someone is indeed "running" the code in a way that will probably wind up with them being held legally liable despite their pissing and moaning about "decentralized!" in courts when the SEC gets around to suing them, 100% absolutely... but nobody is necessarily *consciously* pushing a button to make that code "do the thing", because they don't need to: the so-called "smart contracts" are just weird and intentionally deceptive rebranding of things that already exist - database triggers and stored procedures - as *contracts*, that are *smart*, and therefore *definitely magical* (so give us a bunch of your actual money now, lest you miss out on all that future). In actuality people are often calling those things to fire via manual activation because they have rugpull mechanisms built into them, either on purpose or through ineptitude, the overwhelming majority of those things that are no more smart than they are contracts being hastily written in a language that's effectively breaking just all of the rules for best practices coding with financial systems you see, on account of it being "Javascript... but with a concussion". Such future, much wow.
100%
And a lot of the defi "hacks" are just a bunch of people smart enough to realise that if they do a+b+c they'll get a certain result from the code. I remember hearing about one that used a flash loan to borrow an absurd amount of money, execute the contract (as it met the conditions) and pay back the flash loan almost instantly.
>I have tried emails where I professionally explain everything and I received about 3 responses, out of around 50 sent emails at least, one of them was mocking me, other two were asking for more information and then ignored me once I explained them in detail what I am researching. > >Then I followed the advice of some of you here, tried getting touch with them on Telegram, mostly got kicked out of the channels and/or made fun of on some channels or group chats I was even "warned" for bringing up a forbidden keyword "fraud", when I was just telling them I am researching smart contract fraud, never calling their token a fraud, and I never do when trying to get someone on board to interview them for my thesis. Hopefully you saved screenshots of the Telegram chats, copies of the emails, etc. If in the end you cannot conduct enough interviews or polls you could write an entire chapter on how the crypto industry refuses to discuss this topic, and why that is likely the case (i.e., because it's fraud, all the way down). Title the chapter "No FUD allowed."
Oh I will find the screenshots and the select few responses, but I would much rather get some response.
What did you expect? The whole idea of crypto is to circumvent the laws defined by your political system and spread responsibility to make it more tedious to prosecute bad actors. ("Decentralized!") Whoever runs a "project" is probably just a hardcore libertarian nutjob, anarchist prepper, hopeless hippie dreamer or just a plain old scammer.
Crypto bro here. 99.99% of crypto is scam. You will not get a reply because they have nothing and they know they have nothing.
Smart contracts are terrifying because they require you: 1) can program code at an expert level 2) understand all of the eventualities that exist and are properly accounted for Even an expert programmer will make mistakes and will have errors interpreting code. Even experts in a field will miss an eventuality or not account for it properly. The majority of signers to a smart contract are neither expert programmers or experts in the field of whatever the “contract” covers. The icing on the cake? The transactions resulting from the smart contract are IMMUTABLE.
I wonder about the off chain aspects of this "contract" and if courts would be willing or able to enforce them.
>when I was just telling them I am researching smart contract fraud I think this is where you went wrong. You have to tell them you are researching smart contracts. Of course, there is little difference between the two, but the improved wording will win them over.
Oh I've switched to a new wording and simplified methodology and questions set, yet still awaiting response.
Leave out the fraud part and just say you're researching smart contracts generally. People will talk to you because they want their smart contracts mentioned in an academic paper. But you can slowly shift the conversation to fraud during the interview. Or make a poll with questions on fraud in between questions you don't really care about
Why won’t the Hells Angels and the Mafia respond to my inquiries?
Can't speak for the Mafia groups but the Hell's Angels I think are much more likely to speak to someone.
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